Routine audit at government offices a must

We are shocked to learn of the embezzlement of crores of taka from the treasury under the guise of pension payments. According to a Prothom Alo report, a probe committee under the Office of the Controller General Defence Finance recently found that at least 346 unauthorised arrear pension bills amounting to nearly Tk 6.69 crore were generated to pay 26 retired defence officials over the last two fiscal years. But the retired officials did not receive the full amount; instead, most either received a commission or nothing at all for allowing the money to pass through their bank accounts to three enterprises: Adnan Enterprise, Tamanna Enterprise and Adarsha Stationery.

Two officials of the Office of the Chief Controller of Defence Finance (CCDF), which oversees pension payments to retired defence officers, were temporarily suspended in relation to fraud. However, several other officers at CCDF told this daily that they believe the embezzled amount discovered is just the tip of the iceberg, and that pension payment records from the Awami League government’s time should be investigated to unearth the true scale of the misappropriation.

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They have a point, because the fraud was meticulously designed. Prothom Alo found that the CCDF scam racket dug out personal information of retirees from pension records, convinced or coerced them into getting involved in the fraud, then generated unauthorised arrear pension bills using the government digital payment system, sent the money to the pensioners’ account in instalments, asked them to keep a portion as commission and return the rest to one of the three above-mentioned entities’ account. To avoid suspicion, they also submitted fake treasury challans, to show that the extra pension was “mistakenly disbursed to pensioners,” but the sum was “returned through treasury challans.” In reality, the money went into the pockets of the crony cabal—some pensioners and corrupt CCDF officials.

According to the report, the absence of regular audits since 2023 allowed such misappropriation to go unnoticed. This leads to the question: why would a government department not undergo routine audits? We urge the authorities to dig deeper into this fraud, launch a full investigation, and bring the embezzlers to book. The government must also routinely conduct audit in all its offices that deal with pension payments to prevent such irregularities in the future. The hard-earned money of the taxpayers must never be allowed to be plundered.